Michael Bay's commitment to spectacle is often his downfall as it makes him overlook everything else. He's rightly lampooned for his bad movies, but stuff like The Rock and 13 Hours make it seem like if the right script landed on his desk instead of the latest Kurtzman and Orci project, he'd be making much better…

I saw Patlabor years ago so don't really remember anything about it, but with all the Ghost in the Shell stuff about, I watched Patlabor 2 only last week and it made me think Oshii shouldn't be directing his own films; it looks gorgeous and may have a better fleshed out world than Ghost in the Shell but it's beyond…

Counterpoint: Hollywood movies are fond of using those as signifiers but not as content. Movies haven't been regularly violent since the early 90s due to techniques like cutting on impact and rock music is dad music that the target age groups for movies are less and less interested in, yet its use in trailers and…

That's true but it did feel incomplete at times. Towards the end, for example, Aramaki says he's going to meet the Prime Minister and then one scene later the meeting has already taken place, off screen, making it feel like they skipped something. Maybe I just want more Takeshi.

In Africa, they call him Brother Dwayne.

I'd say 2000 should be Battle Royale. Crouching Tiger is a great wuxia movie but I wouldn't classify it as action.

Is that the one where you see it for a about thirty seconds from the POV of a camera man?

The original had a great concept but couldn't have been executed worse. I have much more faith in Stephen S. DeKnight, whose work on Spartacus should translate well into the action scenes, than I would have with Del Toro, who directed the fights in a way that made me think he was intentionally making sure we couldn't…

There's more characterisation on the posters than there is in the movie for those robots: https://s-media-cache-ak0.p…

Saw Ghost in the Shell this morning and thought it was great. By far the best Ghost in the Shell property, entirely by virtue of having no exposition dump conversations that sound like they were copy and pasted out of a text book. Johansson proves (again) that she has a great taste in science fiction projects and that…

Suddenly, fake news doesn't seem that bad.

I've always liked public transport because it gives me a chance to read or just zone out for about half an hour - which I appreciate it a very short commute when compared to some others - however, I'm currently waiting for my Chinese visa to come through and, planning ahead, I've seen footage of the Beijing metro and…

Is there a non-origin superhero story? Once the hero is established, the next film is always the origin of the villain.

Spirit of Vengeance was the first Marvel movie I saw where it felt clearly split between what the studio mandated and what Neveldine/Taylor could get away with. had they just let them go, it would have been great, but it probably would have been against everything the Marvel brand stands for.

To this day his Batman movies are still referred to as realistic; often with a caveat like putting it in air quotes or attaching a descriptor like 'more realistic' but it's still generally believed. It's how he avoids the criticisms levelled as Zack Snyder for not using colours and being a fascist etc.

Especially when saying yes to anything that pays is what Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are best known for.

The Book of Henry trailer is more than enough to guarantee it. Thankfully for Disney, there's no actual need for a Star Wars film to be good in order to make money.

I signed up while at university and only posted for a few weeks before something to do with conflicting IP addresses got me banned but I remember it feeling like the centre of the internet at the time.

I downloaded a bunch of Initial D soundtracks so I'm listening to a lot of eurobeat.

Q: What is Zach Braff doing behind the camera of the old-dudes comedy Going In Style?
A: Continuing his career long run of creating unmitigated garbage.